Without any explanation from the government or coverage in the local or international media, Libya's most notorious migrant prison, Al-Mabani, officially closed on 13 January 2022.

In its 12 months or so of existence, the prison became emblematic of the irresponsible nature of the wider Libyan detention system. Rape, extortion and murder in the prison were common and well documented.

Al-Mabani was important to the world not only because the United Nations said crimes against humanity were taking place there, but also because its existence and growth was a result of EU policies to prevent migrants from crossing the Mediterranean and reaching European shores.

Journalistically, the closure of Al-Mabani could be seen as a success. A team of reporters exposed serious abuses in the prison, and the government immediately shut it down. But the truth is less encouraging.

The quiet closure of Al-Mabani demonstrates the ever-changing nature of detention in Libya and how this transience makes it almost impossible to protect detainees. Detention centres for migrants open, close and reopen from one week to the next. Detainees are moved around with little traceability. Three thousand people are picked up from one detention centre and mysteriously only 2,500 get off the bus at the next. It takes months for aid workers to get permission for regular visits to prisons like Al-Mabani - only to have to start the process all over again when the detainees arrive at a new prison. As a result, militias can disappear, torture and detain refugees indefinitely with a degree of impunity.

Al-Mabani's closure also illustrates how power and governance actually work in Libya. What determines how migrants are treated, where they are held, for how long and whether they are released has less to do with the law or humanitarian imperatives than with patronage and payment.

Al-Mabani was probably not closed down because journalists revealed that guards there had committed crimes such as the murder of Aliou Candé and the extortion and torture of many other migrants. Rather, Al-Mabani was shut down because of a political struggle between two men vying to head Libya's Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration (DCIM), which manages the flow of detained migrants. The detention of migrants in Libya is big business, and for the detainees everything has a price: protection, food, medicine and, most expensive of all, freedom.

When a director, General Al-Mabrouk Abdel-Hafiz, lost his command post at the DCIM, the Al-Mabani prison, run by his favourite militia, went bankrupt. The day after Mabrouk lost his job, Al-Mabani published his last post on Facebook. When the new director, Mohammed al-Khoja, took over as head of DCIM, the lucrative flow of migrant detainees was diverted to Al-Sikka prison, a facility he had previously run. A UN spokeswoman confirmed that many of the Al-Mabani detainees had been transferred to Al-Sikka. To the victor go the spoils.

The closure of Al-Mabani is also part of a wider push by the Libyan government to move official detention centres out of Tripoli. It is more difficult for prisoners to escape if the prison is in the middle of nowhere. Pressure from aid groups and journalists is also less likely as the government tightens restrictions on movement outside the capital.

Al-Mabani, which means 'the buildings' in Arabic, opened in early 2021 and was notoriously brutal. No journalists were ever allowed inside the facility, but fleeing migrants recounted what happened there, occasionally supported by mobile phone footage. Violence at Al-Mabani peaked in October with a mass shooting of migrants during a stampede, just days after authorities rounded up and arbitrarily detained up to 5,000 migrants from Gargaresh, a nearby migrant slum. Some of our staff who witnessed this incident describe injured migrants lying on the ground in pools of blood,' said Federico Soda, head of the International Organisation for Migration's Libya office. Six were killed. Two dozen others were wounded.

In December last year, the Outlaw Ocean Project, in collaboration with The New Yorker magazine, published an investigation into Al Mabani and the wider system of shadow detention that the EU has helped to create. The report told the story of Aliou Candé, a climate refugee from Guinea-Bissau, who was arrested in the Mediterranean by the EU-funded Libyan coastguard, sent back to Al-Mabani and eventually killed by his guards.

This report certainly played a role in the closure of Al-Mabani. But the most important aspect of this event is how nepotism passes for governance in Libya, how crimes against humanity are the result, and how the EU continues to financially support these abuses through its support for the Libyan coastguard.

The pattern is clear. The militias run the detention centres for as long as they can, then shut them down when the power changes hands or the media shines too much light on them. Al-Mabani, for example, was only set up to take detainees from another notoriously violent prison, Tajoura, after it attracted too much attention. It was bombed in 2019, and investigators found that some of the migrants killed had been forced to do military work, such as preparing weapons. 'Closing individual centres or centralising the detention of migrants will do little to address the systematic abuse of refugees and migrants and underlines the need to root out the abusive detention system as a whole,' Amnesty said in a 2021 report.

The EU has been slow to take responsibility for its role. In January, the Outlaw Ocean Project presented details of its research to the European Parliament's Human Rights Committee, highlighting the EU's widespread support for Libya's migration control apparatus. European Commission representatives took issue with our characterisation of the crisis. We are not funding a war on migrants,' said Rosamaria Gili, director for Libya at the European External Action Service. We are trying to instil a culture of human rights.

Yet just a week later, European Commission representative Henrike Trautmann told lawmakers that the EU was providing five more ships to the Libyan coastguard to boost its ability to intercept migrants on the high seas.

More vessels mean more arrests. Last year, more than 32,000 migrants were apprehended by the Libyan coastguard and returned to Libyan migrant prisons. With additional EU support, this number is likely to rise in 2022. We know that the Libyan context is far from optimal for this,' Trautmann admitted. But we still think it is better to continue to support them than to leave them to their fate.

Cover picture: Sandor Csudai